Upcoming Postpartum Depression Trainings & Things You Need to Know

There are a lot of postpartum depression events, goings on, happenings and newsy things flying into my inbox these days so I wanted to give everyone an update:

Postpartum Support Virginia is the beneficiary of two upcoming LUNAFEST events. LUNAFEST is a traveling film festival of short films by, for and about women. If you attend either one of the screenings, you will help support PSVa, which helps women in Virginia with postpartum depression. The first is on Wednesday, March 7 in Arlington at the Arlington Cinema n’ Drafthouse, and the second is on Sunday, March 11, in Charlottesville at the University of Virginia. To get more information or purchase a ticket, click here.

Pec Indman, Ed.D., LMFT, will be doing a 6-hour training called “Maternal Mental Health: Assessment and Treatment of Prenatal and Postpartum Mood and Anxiety Disorders” on March 9th at Santa Clara University in Santa Clara, CA (near San Jose airport). CEUs and CEs are available. To learn more or register, click here.

I will be speaking at South by Southwest Interactive on March 13th in Austin, TX, with a panel of fabulous people, including Beerly Robertson who heads social media for the March of Dimes. We will be talking about utilizing social media to benefit nonprofits and social good.

Eliot Hospital is hosting a perinatal depression conference on the evening of Thursday, April 5th, at SERESC in Bedford, New Hampshire. The keynote speaker will be Marlene Freeman, MD, of the Massachusetts General Hospital Center for Women’s Mental Health. CEUs will be available. To learn more or register, click here.

Postpartum Support International is hosting a Reproductive Psychiatry seminar and its Perinatal Mood & Anxiety Disorder 2-Day Training in Las Vegas from June 27-30th. You can attend either or both events, plus some other neat things that are going on. To get more information or to register, click here.

Karen Kleiman, author and founder of the Postpartum Stress Center, will be hosting several of her 10-hour postgraduate training events on postpartum depression throughout 2012. All of them are held in her offices in Rosemont, PA. To learn more, click here.

Also, very important: the Perinatal Depression Information Network is seeking people/organizations who provide mental health services or conduct perinatal mental health research to share information in a short survey. You will be invited to describe your clinical, research, or community-based perinatal mental health program. The Perinatal Depression Information Network (PDIN) (www.pdinfonetwork.org) is a new and dynamic electronic resource that collects and organizes information on perinatal depression and mental health at the state and local level, including programs, services, materials and contacts. The PDIN provides a growing knowledge base of initiatives in the United States and its territories – creating an online community of public and private resource partners to share information, promote innovative and effective practices in the field, and enhance interdisciplinary collaboration. It will eventually expand to include other countries. The PDIN creates a forum to bring together maternal, child, and mental health providers, leaders, researchers, and families to address perinatal depression and its significant threat to the well-being of mothers and their families.

The online survey will take you about 10 minutes to complete. You will be asked questions about your clinical practice(s), research program(s), and/or regional perinatal mental health initiatives and the populations they serve. The PDIN staff will populate the Perinatal Depression Information Network website with the information you provide so that primary care providers and women struggling with perinatal mental health issues can find suitable practitioners or participate in perinatal mental health research. To begin the survey, click on this link: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/533NZT2.

Some of the information obtained from the survey and website will be used for presentations and descriptive studies. This information was determined “not human research” by Colorado Multiple Institutional Review Board (COMIRB) because it is factual (concerning practices, services, and research), and is not information about subjects.